Reddit mentions of 1500 JAPANESE VOCABULARY WORDS FOR THE JLPT LEVEL 4 (Trilingue Japonais - Anglais - Chinois) (N4 (4))

I liked the 日本語チャレンジ book for learning grammar (and reading). They also have one for vocabulary and one for kanji. The 'challenge' book is similar to the So-matome series, except you have 4 pages instead of two per lesson, with only 4 lessons per week instead of 6, and an additional booklet with translations and additional grammar explanations.


I also used the はじめての日本語能力試験 N4単語 1500 book for vocabulary. You can download the recordings from their website (it's only the Japanese word and example sentence). It comes with that red sheet to test yourself with.


It's always good to get multiple resources to learn in the material in different ways and get more explanations of things. But I liked these two. You can also look into graded readers to practice reading. This series goes from level 0 to 4 with 3 volumes per level, and comes with a CD with some of the recordings (you can get the rest from their website) to practice listening. The levels are loosely based on the JLPT. Level 4 is the "hardest" and is aimed at JLPT N2 and N3; Level 3 is aimed at JLPT N3 and N4; Level 2 is aimed at JLPT N4; Level 1 is for JLPT N5; and Level 0 is for pre-JLPT. You can start with Level 1 or 2 if you want to see how hard it may be.

I'd say since you already started AJATT: keep on doing it!

Though I can't tell if you actually found AJATT or MIA (Mass Immersion Approach), because the latter was created by a YouTuber called Matt vs Japan who became fluent through AJATT but improved upon it to make it easier to get into and eventually branched off and called it MIA.

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The MIA progression, as far as I understood it, starts with immersion and Kanji Study (Seems like you do immerse and already finished the Kanji and only review them).

Tae Kim is only meant as a small start into getting familiar with basic Japanese grammar, sentence structure etc.

From what I've seen, the current recommendation for MIA is to just read through Tae Kim without worrying about mining the sentences in there and to sentence mine from the Tango N5 and maybe the N4 book (N5 here and the N4 here) and alongside that, to sentence mine from the native material that you use for immersion. This is supposed to give you a good foundation in terms of grammar knowledge and vocab. At that point you should have have mined at least 2k-3k sentences and should already be quite proficient in reading.

At that point, you are supposed to do the monolingual transition, meaning that you ditch almost all English in your studies and try to just use Japanese. You do this mainly by sentence mining native material and looking up the Japanese definitions of words you don't understand.

You should never learn single vocab, only sentences, so you learn vocab in context and have a better understanding on how the words are used.

Now that is just a rough outline of the process. While I am definitely not fluent, all I wrote you can verify yourself by watching Matt vs Japan's YouTube videos, in which he goes into more detail (Don't get discouraged by the length of the videos, they can be quite "rambly" but still contain valuable information about the whole process).

Other than that, there is an ajatt sub where people asked all kinds of questions, probably yours as well.

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All this goes against common sense and is quite different from the traditional, textbook-oriented approach, so don't let people tell you that your approach is wrong and you should do X or Y.

Watch Matt's videos and decide for yourself, whether this method is something you really want to follow.